PORT NEWARK — A barge with 9,500 tons of road salt has arrived in Port Newark to help replenish New Jersey's depleted supplies, ahead of yet another snow event for Garden State residents.

The shipment, arriving from Searsport, Maine, is the first load from a 40,000-ton stockpile in New England the state Department of Transportation purchased two weeks ago from International Salt Co. to bulk up New Jersey's dwindling supplies, officials in the maritime industry confirmed this morning. This load is in addition to a cargo ship from Chile that arrived last week with salt.

Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said the barge is in but will most likely not start offloading the salt until Wednesday.

At an unrelated news conference on Monday, DOT commissioner Jim Simpson said New Jersey is still experiencing a salt shortage but the shipments help. Without them, he said he would have been prepared to shut down interstates in the next snowstorm.

"We still have a salt shortage. The first barge has still not arrived yet. Can you imagine that? Two weeks!," he said, hours before the Columbia Norfolk barge docked at Port Newark on Monday night.

Mary Kay Warner, marketing manager for Pennsylvania-based International Salt, said the barge would have to be uncovered, a process that could take up to a day, before the salt could be offloaded. Then, the barge would turn around and head back to Searsport to collect another 9,500 tons. The round-trip is likely to take 10 days, she said.

New Jersey is having some of its emergency salt supply barged in after the federal government would not waive a provision of the 1920 Maritime Act that prohibits foreign vessels from making domestic deliveries. Simpson said last week he had requested that a foreign ship, the Anastasia S., which had already made a delivery in Maine and was docked in Searsport at the time, be permitted to move the salt because it was headed to Port Newark empty. But the U.S. Department of Homeland Security denied the waiver and the U.S. Department of Transportation's Maritime Administration instead found the American-based barge to make the delivery.